


The Music

by peptobismolbird



Series: The Town of Hope [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28650306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peptobismolbird/pseuds/peptobismolbird
Summary: Sheriff Kieth, stunned by his realizations, picks up the next box kept in record storage..
Series: The Town of Hope [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1841620
Kudos: 1





	The Music

I set down the letters written by Morgan Fielding, and take in a deep breath. It’s a story that I can’t remember because as far as I know, the shop known as red tree antiques has been run down for years. Nothing has ever been inside, no one has ever owned it, but this account tells such a different story to what I know as reality. I need to know more.

I look at the boxes, looking for anything else familiar to me. I spy a name, and when I see it, my heart drops into the pit of my stomach. It’s a name that I know, and this time, I know exactly where from. Johnathan Davis runs the most popular restaurant in the town, and he’s well-liked by our town. I know for a fact that this man is alive, and so I pull the box down from the dusty metal shelf, setting it on the ground. I pull out the report, unsure of what I’ll find.

Looking inside of the box and at the report held within, I have no words for my confusion. The same as Morgan’s case, a picture is clipped to the rest of the report. Whoever the report is of, it is not of Johnathan Davis. John is a tall, thin man with wisps of gray curls atop his head. His eyes are a deep blue, with bags underneath them. I’ve never seen him smile, but he’s still a kind person based on our interactions. The person in the picture cannot be John, because it looks nothing like the person I know. The man in the picture isn’t nearly as tall, and he’s far from thin. No, the man in the picture is a portly man with a thick black beard and a bald head. His eyes, as much as the picture will show, are brown, and he has a wide smile spread across his face.

The paper the picture is attached is a report filed by Mr. Davis, describing what he believed to be a potential stalker from out of town. I pick up the page and begin to read.

“There’s a gas station just outside of town, not a lot of people know about it, and I can’t say that I blame them. It’s a little bit out of the way, and the quality of the place can’t really be compared to the station that’s inside of the town. When I went there, it was because I was coming back or headed out to pick up some supplies for the kitchen. The restaurant can’t get everything that it needs from our little town, and I like to use fresh ingredients when it comes to things like seafood and meat. Any of the proteins, really. I drive out a few hours to go to a farmers market on the outskirts of the forest, in a bit of a more well-known town. I head back, and I usually pick up gas at the station that’s outside of Hope.

Now, there was never anything weird about that. It was a pretty regular process, done every once or twice a week depending on our specials, and I’ve been doing it for years. The station was a bit run down, maybe, but nothing else could really be said about it. The owner wasn’t overly social, but I can’t imagine a man with a business on the edge of the woods would be social, anyway, so it wasn’t exactly surprising. The gas station is called the Stop N’ Shop, owned by a guy named Mr. Miller. It was the Stop N’ Pump for a while, until Mr. Miller got really determined to sell the pitch of his artisanal soaps. They weren’t that good, but I ended up buying one every time I went to that station because of how sad that man looked.

He spent most of his time inside the little shack where he kept the register and the handmade soaps, stood behind the counter and staring at a newspaper. I’ve never seen him around town, to the point where I’m not even sure he has a home there. I think he must live in the shop, he just didn’t seem to exist outside of it. That’s ridiculous, of course, that little hovel of a shop was far too small for the business he wanted and definitely too small for someone to live in. I assume that wherever he did live, he just never left, but its hard to be sure. The local paper delivered every morning to all of the houses, so most people end up having quite a couple of copies of it. Mr. Miller, as far as I could tell from when I went inside his little shop, only ever read the exact same copy of the exact same paper. One from roughly ten years ago, it was a bit old and a bit tattered.

So the station and its owner were a bit weird, but there wasn’t much else to be said about it. It wasn’t like he ever did anything harmful to me or anyone else that I could see, though I’m not sure anyone else ever went to that station anyway.

It’s important for me to tell you all of this, because everything else that I’m going to describe happened at this gas station, just a few miles outside of our town. It began about two weeks ago, when I was stopped at the Stop N’ Shop to refill my tank and head back into town with my supplies. It was late, windy, and definitely a little cold. With autumn settling in, the chill of winter hung just out of sight with an influence you could feel. With that in mind, I was pretty eager to get back into my car and move on. The pump was slower than normal, maybe because of the cold, or maybe because I was so eager to get a move on. Technology always seems to slow down the more urgent it is to be quick, not that this was necessarily urgent.

That’s when I heard it. That’s when I heard the music. It was faint, somewhere in the distance, the sound carried on the wind, but it was music. It’s odd because Mr. Miller tended to spend his time in silence even if he did own a CD player, and the only radio stations we get in Hope are the local ones. The local stations weren’t running at this hour, given that it was roughly one in the morning; I had been running late that night. We don’t have many camping sites around, at least not that close to our town. Most of the outdoor rec business had been closed for some time, mostly due to a lack of customers, but you know that. The only thing I had ever encountered on nights by that station was silence. So you can imagine hearing music took me somewhat by surprise.

The song was barely audible, but I could definitely make out the semblance of a melody. It was out of tune, and the sounds were far too discordant with one another to really be called anything pleasant. Hearing it bothered me a lot, especially with how it cut in and out with the breeze, it seemed as if the wind was the only thing carrying that song. It definitely wasn’t anything you’d get on a CD, and sounded more like something an amateur had done if that person had a particularly weird taste in music. If I had to call it anything, I would call it noise music. It was still music, I was sure of that, but that melody was undercut by such a discordant noise. If it had been any louder, or any closer, or if it wasn’t constantly cutting out, it would have made my ears bleed.

Now, I’m no grandpa, I’m not saying that in a way to insult younger generations music taste or something like that. It was genuinely quite unsettling with how the sounds clashed together in the exact opposite of harmony. It was awful. I thought, at first, that maybe I was just far too tired for my own good, and that I was hearing things. There was no way it could have been there, after all, unless some kid was out in the woods with the worst CD player known to man. I shrugged it off and moved on with my life. It didn’t exactly make me feel good, but that was about it.

I heard it again the next time I visited the Stop N’ Shop. Mr. Miller and I had our short exchange, I bought a small brick of his soap, and I went to my jeep. I began to fill up the tank, and as I stood there, I heard the music again. It was the same song, with that same off-key melody where every note sounded like it hated the notes that were playing with it. It was still only on the wind, though. It’s strange to explain exactly what I mean by that. Smells carry on the wind, it blows and you get a whiff of something that’s somewhere else. Like a really good barbecue, or something like that. It’s the same concept, whenever the wind blew, I could hear that music. I think it was a little bit closer that time, or perhaps the wind could have been stronger. I’m not really sure. I still shrugged it off, though, I didn’t want to think about it. The way those notes clashed with each other made my skin crawl over my flesh in such an unsettling way. I ignored it, and I left.

When I stopped by the next week, I heard it again. This time, I heard it as I was getting out of the car before I stepped inside that little shop and talked to Mr. Miller. Upon hearing it again, I made my mind to ask Mr. Miller about it. I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting from him, but I mostly wanted to know that it wasn’t all in my hand, I wanted some kind of confirmation that it was actually real, and I wasn’t losing any marbles. So, when I was buying that little bar of soap, I brought it up. I asked him if he had ever heard it before. As I said, I wasn’t expecting anything.

What I got, I couldn’t have been prepared for. Mr. Miller began to visibly sweat, and he got very nervous very quickly. His eyes began to dart back and forth, and he leaned forward as if someone might be listening in on our conversation but we were alone. We were likely the only people in at least a few miles radius, but I humored him. I leaned forward, and he asked me if I could really hear it. I told him yes, I could. He breathed an audible sigh of relief when I told him that I could hear it, and in a way, I understood the sentiment. I was glad that I wasn’t crazy, after all.

Apparently, Mr. Miller could hear that song playing out at his station almost all the time, like someone was camped nearby with a radio just to torment that poor, lonely man. When I told him about how quiet it was, he tilted his head in confusion. It was loud, he said like it was right there in the room with him. I asked him if it was playing now, and he nodded. I couldn’t hear it, not while I was inside. In fact, it was disturbingly quiet. 

Now, I don’t know if you know much about the forest, but it’s never quiet. There’s always crickets or owls or something scurrying around through fallen leaves. There was never really silence in the forest, but right now, there wasn’t a single sound, and I only just then put it together. It had been silent every time I had been there when that music was playing, like its notes had killed every living thing around. Stupid, I know, but the very thought of it made my heart sink like a rock. Even the wind was quiet, save for the whispering of discordant music. Mr. Miller asked me, almost desperately, if I wanted to hear it.

I shook my head. Just barely hearing it on the wind was already too much for me, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to hear that awful song blasted right into my ears. By this point, I was ready to go home. I reached to take my bar of soap and go fill up my car, but before I could do so, Mr. Miller’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. His hand was clammy and damp, but his grip was that of a vice. He just stared at me, and he asked me again. He asked me if I wanted to hear the music, his voice pleading as if his very life depended on it. At that moment, with his hand tight around my wrist, I could hear it in the distance. It was quiet, but horrid all the same. My skin crawled and my veins ran icy. It was the only sound in the world, I couldn’t even hear Mr. Miller's breathing.

I told him, no, and he finally relented. I could see tears welling in the corners of his eyes, but I didn’t think anything about it, not until I got into my car. I didn’t even bother to fill the tank up, I just wanted to get out of there. I felt cold wrapping its way around my heart and squeezing tight, I couldn’t be there. I was just about to pull away when I saw it in the distance.

It, though now that I’m no longer shaken I’m sure it must have been a person, was spindly and thin. Maybe it was the darkness, or the distance, or the fact that I was tired, but it was far too thin to be human. It was like someone had taken an image of a person and stretched it vertically into the sky. It was lurking behind the shop, sprawled out on all fours by the wall behind where the counter sat. The thing was devoid of color entirely, but when the wind blew across its body it lit up like a firework. Colors sprawled out of its form, spilled in a chaotic mess into the air around it, each shade clashing with the one next to it like it was a war for territory. When the wind blew, I heard the music, and the melody pulsated inside that thing. It wasn’t right, but I know that’s what I saw. I couldn’t move, because even when the wind stopped, and the colors faded, I could still hear the music.

The thing crawled towards the windows of the shop, and I knew that it was going for Mr. Miller. I turned on my car, and I drove away. I didn’t stop to look back, and I didn’t think about the man I had left behind. The music didn’t go away. It hasn’t gone away. Whatever it is, it’s still following me, and every night, it gets a little bit louder.”


End file.
